ABSTRACT

Since the 1970s, many things have been said about the character of the Roman economy and the extent of its monetary economy. This discussion was led by ancient historians such as Finley, Crawford, Hopkins, Howgego and Duncan-Jones, often using monetary circulation as a measure of economic integration. 1 Both literary and archaeological sources were used to create large-scale models of the Roman economy, concentrating on questions of monetization of the economy: how fast, how wide, how deep. Mostly, coin hoards and museum collections were used as archaeological evidence for monetary circulation: large-scale inventories of stray finds were not yet available, or deemed too time-consuming to analyse. In the last ten years, however, much more work has been done on a regional level, leading to regional inventories and analyses of both hoards and stray finds. 2